We describe the development of the SRI systemevaluated in the 1996 DARPA continuous speechrecognition (CSR) Hub4 partitioned evaluation (PE). The task for the Hub4evaluation was to recognize speech from broadcast television and radio shows. Recognizingsuch speech by machines poses many challenges. First, the segments to be recognized could be very long. This introduces a problem in training and recognition becauseof the consequentincreasedsystem memory requirement. A simple segmentation technique is used to break long segments into shorter, more manageable lengths. The speech from broadcast news sources exhibits a variety of difficult acoustic conditions, such as spontaneous speech, band-limited speech, and speech in the presence of noise, music, or background speakers. Such background conditions lead to significant degradation in performance. We describe techniques, based on acoustic adaptation, that adapt recognition models to the different acoustic background conditions, so as to im...